Saturday, November 28, 2015

There is, I fear, no end in sight of the nonsensical nonsense being unleashed in the wake of various high-level ecclesiastic dalliances with doctrinal ambiguity and disciplinary confusion in regard to holy Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics. Call it Life in this Valley of Tears. Anyway, Pope Francis is going to do about this whatever he is going to about it and the Church will respond to whatever he does in due course. For now, I simply write to urge caution about some proposals to facilitate irregular reception of the Sacrament in these cases even if such proposals are couched in apparently sophisticated scholarly terms.

For example, an Australian theologian has proposed a rescript to be issued by a bishop in accord with norms supposedly to be devised by Pope Francis, granting permission for divorced-and-remarried Catholics to take holy Communion. The proposal includes impressive vocabulary such as “juridical” and “administrative” and “canons”; it sports footnotes to “assessors” and “salus animarum” and warns about “anomalies”; it underscores Church teaching on the permanence of marriage and assures readers that it offers no doctrinal or canonical changes to this teaching.

Balderdash. Pure, unadulterated, balderdash. This proposed rescript is really a license to sin.

More specifically, this rescript would (purport to) grant permission to ignore one sin (adultery) and to commit another (sacrilegious reception of holy Communion). It even manages to suggest a third sin (attempting sacramental Confession without firm purpose of amendment)! Couched in mellifluous pastoral, sacramental, and canonical language, to be issued on arch/diocesan letterhead, such a letter, expressly invoking Our Lord’s teaching on marriage and to be signed by a Successor of the Apostles in the name of Christ, who—I kid you not—congratulates the couple on their perseverance in allowing the Church to grant them this favor(!), would constitute, I suggest, a blasphemy (CCC 2148).

Peters is on a roll in this post. Do yourself a favor and read it. Not only will you be edified. You wouldn't want to miss the long-sought apparition of an eminent canon lawyer as the irrepressible Doc Holliday announcing his arrival at the final showdown with Johnny Ringo with the words, "I'm your Huckleberry."

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

My wife did this, exactly, for our son's wedding, in the 25th year of her continuing, unrepentant adultery. This resulted in me walking out of the wedding during communion and leaving for home. This was encouraged by the Church. I forewarned the Bishop, asking for his intervention to address our longstanding marital violation. I was ignored. A young, inexperienced priest was manipulated by my wife into allowing her conscience to be her final arbiter. To this day the priest, as I understand it. has no real idea of what her did, nor thinks it improper. I left the Church with tears in my eyes!

Peters talks a good talk but he fails to call for certain justice when marriages are destroyed by the incentive that annulments give to divorce and the breakdown of marriage. I read Ed Peters frequently. He is knowledgeable, usually very careful and addresses important issues quite informatively.

None of the priests whose decisions in our cases resulted in our 12 year battle, the first time, which ended in Rome have been held to account for their, in some cases intentional, mishandling, of our case. I have complained for decades to no avail. There is no interest in justice, Nor is there an interest in healing wounded marriages. There is only an interest in encouraging annulments, no matter the cost. No bishop in the hierarchy, for 27 years, has been willing to intervene.

There is no such thing as a desire to accompany an abandoned spouse. That is an outright falsehood. It is far easier to ignore a malcontent such as myself, than it is to address, their concerns, fairly, truthfully and fully.

I am nobody, except a solitary man who has remained faithful to an abandoned marriage, in January 2016, for 27 years, and who has openly sought the help of the Catholic Church, in America and in Rome, to address working to heal a broken marriage and to call attention to the destruction that is wrought upon many marriages and many lives, EVEN when the tribunal system is correct! But when it is wrong, the consequence will be HELL, quite literally, for many, and, most likely, for myself.

Even Canonists who I thought were fair and upright are unwilling to forcefully demand justice, from the Catholic hierarchy, for our case and in other cases of unjust marital abandonment.

My soul is trash to the Catholic Church. The faith of our children is worthless to Jorge Bergoglio and his minions!